Cheese has a spot in my holy trinity of food. There’s wine. (Oh dear God, yes!) There’s bread. (Hopelessly devoted to the kind you can knock on, like a hollow door.) And there’s cheese. (Brought some for lunch because I’d be drooling like a bloodhound after interviews for this story.)
Over the past couple of decades, we’ve weaned ourselves from supermarket Monterey Jack and Cheddar (right?). We started dropping French names. Mon Dieu! How about that Brillat-Savarin triple cream. And Quebec seduced with its cheese savoir faire. I was addicted to La Sauvagine for years.
But in the last decade, especially after the 100 Mile Diet phenom, B.C.’s been getting cheesier and cheesier with a growing number of small artisanal and farmhouse operations. We’ve grown from about three or four to about about 15 in that time. We’re vastly outnumbered by the thousand or so artisanal cheesemakers in the U.S. but still, of late, my cheese radar has been shrinking in radius. While the Saltspring Island Cheese Company is pretty well known (why, I’ve even seen it at Costco and it’s crossed provincial borders into stores), and Moonstruck has been producing mighty fine, rich cheeses for about the same time, starting up in the late ‘90s, my current obsession is for Farm House Natural Cheese’s La Pyramide ash-ripened goat cheese (from Agassiz) which has held me hostage by being so good. Creston’s Kootenay Meadows Farm (formerly Kootenay Alpine Cheese Co.) also has me pinned and surrendered. Their award-winning Nostrala and Alpindon are lovely. (They both took second place in the 2010 American Cheese Society competition, coming in behind a three-time grand champ.)
It’s time to learn a few cheese words. A farmhouse or fermier cheese is produced with milk from the cheesemaker’s own dairy cows (or goats or sheep), which is the case with both Kootenay Meadows and Farm House Natural Cheeses. In the case of Kootenay Meadows, the family also grows their own feed (high-quality alfalfa) for the cows. And that really gets to the heart of why these small producers are so darn appealing. Not only do consumers know where the milk is from, the cows are picked, nurtured, fed and cared for to produce the best milk for the intended cheeses. Little Qualicum Cheese (Parksville), Gort’s Gouda (Armstrong), Jerseyland Organics (Grand Forks) and Moonstruck Organic Cheese (Saltspring Island) are also fermier cheese companies in B.C.

Farm House Cheese family with dairy cows

Artisanal cheesemakers, as opposed to fermier, don’t produce their own milk. There isn’t an industry definition (yet) but artisanal implies small operations with an artisan cheesemaker, using traditional cheesemaking processes. The next level would be cooperative cheeses with milk sourced from various farms. And at the industrial level, it’s a factory.
“At the industrial level, it’s automated and they pump it out by the thousands of pounds,” says Jonah Benton of Benton Brothers Cheese, who owns three fine cheese stores with brother Andrew. “It doesn’t mean it’s bad cheese. There are some great examples out there.”
The Bentons usually carry cheeses from about seven or eight B.C. cheesemakers including Moonstruck, Saltspring Island Cheese, Kootenay Meadows, Little Qualicum, Poplar Grove, Happy Days, and Farm House Cheese.
Kootenay Meadows begins their cheese with non-thermalized raw milk. “It’s true raw milk. A lot of raw milk is heated but not quite to pasteurization and it changes the milk and cheese,” says Nadine Ben-Rabha, who, with her mother Denise Harris, are the cheese-making part of the family-run dairy. (Raw milk cheeses in Canada are aged for 60 days before it can be sold to kill off possible harmful bacteria; acids and salts in raw milk cheese naturally prevent harmful bacteria from growing.)
“The cheese should be an expression of the farm it came from. You can taste the fauna and terroir in our cheeses,” she says. “If you buy from a milk pool, you lose the link with the cows and the soil which are integral to cheesemaking.”
Cheesemaking is an expensive business to start up which might explain why it’s a slow-growing industry. Both Kootenay Meadows and Farmhouse Natural began cheesemaking as a value-added operation for their dairy operations.
Ten years ago, dairy farmers were pressured to produce lower butterfat milk in response to consumers wanting more skim milk, says Debra Amrein-Boyes of Farm House Natural Cheeses. ““Cows naturally produce a certain amount of butterfat, Rather than use fat blocker chemicals in the feed we decided to diversify into cheesemaking rather than manipulate their diet.” In fact, she and her husband changed the herd to increase the fat level for cheesemaking. Now they have Guernsey and Brown Swiss cows as well as goats.

George Boyes of Farm House Cheese with goats

The pressure to produce lower butterfat milk eased a couple years later but looking back, it was a good move. Amrein-Boyes has been inducted into the prestigious French Cheese Guild, Guilde des Fromagers Confrerie de Saint-Uguzon, recognizing those who protect and continue the traditional cheesemaking around the world. She was also nominated in 2009 for a World Gourmand Cookbook Award for her book, 200 Easy Homemade Cheese Recipes.
“We custom design our milk for our cheese,” she says. “We have lower producing animals and the quality of milk depends on how you feed and treat the cows.”
Amrein-Boyes is happy to share her knowledge. In fact, Golden Ears Cheese in Maple Ridge, the newest addition to B.C. artisan cheese, might not have existed without her. Golden Ears’ cheesemaker Jenna Davison, 25, apprenticed under Amrein-Boyes and went on to make cheese at her family’s farm, three generations old, in Maple Ridge. (Her brother produces the milk as another business on the family farm.) To her astonishment, after only a couple of years in operation, her brie and Havarti cheeses were in the top three in the Canadian Cheese Grand Prix last month. She had only submitted it to get the judge’s comments on the flavour and texture.

Cheesemaker Jenna Davison of Golden Ears Cheesecrafters

Amrein-Boyes is training another cheesemaker and that apprentice’s boyfriend is using part of the Farm House farmland and the equipment to get started in farming.
Farmstead and artisanal cheesemaking has become more difficult and expensive even as the demand grows. “The regulatory end is quite intimidating,” says Julia Grace, a partner at Moonstruck Cheese. “We have one full-time staff to take care of the regulatory end of things. It’s an expensive business to get into.”
But the local foods movement and animal welfare concerns help her business. “We take good care of our cows (which are Jerseys). People know industrial confinement operations are pretty grim and they know a lot more about it today. I know quite a few people become customers because they want to support our animals.”
The secret to success, Grace says, is “understanding your milk” and how best to use it. “Jersey milk is incredibly rich and creamy and full-flavoured and we tend to make those succulent French style cheeses like Camembert and blue.” Because they have their own animals, they can use raw milk. “You don’t want raw milk being trucked or put through hoses because it can degrade. You need to use it quickly and you really have to know it’s very high quality,” she says.
If there’s anything certain about the artisanal and fermier cheese industry, it’s growth. “We expect a lot of changes in the next few years,” says Benton. “And it’ll be in the area of growth. People are getting educated and experimenting with cheeses and they’re looking for B.C. products. We’re starting, in B.C. to make our own styles as opposed to copying.”

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